Well, I think I'm finally getting over whatever sickness it is that I've had for the past week... I hope. Not very condusive to working on things... That said, a lot of developments have come up recently that I thought I would post about. Fair warning, this is gonna be kinda random. =)
PEP Improvements
I would just like to throw a shout out to the folk who have been working on PEP. I love the latest bit of changes and believe they will make it soooo much easier to implement. Woot!
Familiar on my Pocket PC
As per some advice from a previous post, I have been looking into getting Familiar and it's associated desktops on my Pocket PC (IPAQ 2200). Lovely hardware. Crappy software. (Pocket PC OS.. think it's even of the Windows CE vintage) Anyway, I soon found there are two main choices for desktops for Familiar, GPE and OPIE. First off, I adore the IPAQ's serial console and also the Familiar bootloader (forget it's name) and Familiar itself. There's something just neat about watching Linux booting on your little handheld device. Now, I right now my IPAQ has stuff for installing Familiar 0.8.3 (I think?) with GPE, and a beta Familiar 0.8.4 (I think?) with GPE or OPIE. 0.8.3 works fairly well except that I don't particularly care for the GPE desktop environment. I think it's a tad silly to deal with getting root and that sort of thing on a handheld device. Likewise, some of the apps aren't particularly helpful/nice. For example, I can't get either wireless card I have to work. One SDIO, and one CompactFlash/PC Card/I'm not sure. lol No worries on the lack of support for them yet, but the weird thing is that when I go to the webbrowser, and type in a url, it does .. well like nothing. No error message, no nothing. I goes back to the main webbrowser window. Nothing is particularly pretty. Overall, it just feels like it's trying to be too Linux. =) Now OPIE, on the other hand, is gorgeous, acts like a handheld device "ought to", and is generally quite nice! No love on the wireless card yet still, which is odd, but I'll get to that in a moment. I'm very excited about getting OPIE on there in a functional manner. Problem is, it's not real functional under Familiar 0.8.4whatever. All known bugs according to their trackers, so no worries there, I'm sure things will be fine. =) Very much looking forward to full functionality! As for the wireless cards, looks like there's no support for SDIO cards period. So ignoring that, the compact flash wireless card... the online docs say something about what driver I would need to use, but said driver isn't selectable. Soo.... yeah. Maybe that's a pending release of the OS type thing. Either way, that'll be mega cool to have when things are ironed out. I'll be keeping an eye on things.
Nokia 770
Well, I am finally the proud owner of a Nokia 770. I went and purchased one on Friday. Comp USA... I would just like to say that your inventory control system is "the crap". While it isn't ideal, I don't like that your web site says that there's no copies of it in stock and yet the store actually has some. HOWEVER, how in the hell is it that I call you and you say you don't have any in stock and yet we drive over there, the guy in the handhelds department turns around, looks it up in the computer, and sees one available. ??? Are you all's computers not tied together or what? Bah. Anyway, the nice guy found it hiding in a cabinet and low and behold, it's mine. I immediately upgraded to the latest OS. I love that it's self-sufficient! I don't have to tie it to a desktop to install things, or get it working, or anything. It's wireless functionality rocks. Hell it picks up devices around that I didn't know existed. =D It cheerfully ties to my phone for access. Unnnnfortunately, our friends at Sprint have dinked over the LG PM-325 firmware in a way that makes it unable to behave properly as a modem. It keeps connecting and then disconnecting after like 20 seconds or so. There's a lot of nice bluetooth functionality in my phone that doesn't work with Sprint's own firmware on there. I made the mistake of evaluating the phone based off LGs specs, not Sprint's implementation of it. Bah. Not much I can do about it. Sprint doesn't even sell my phone anymore so... yeah. As a phone, I love it though. Oh well on that front. Anyway, it ties into my home network really well. Amusingly enough, my friend who bought a 770 a couple of months ago's hardware address is exactly one less than mine. =) I've only had a few problems with opera so far. But those are pretty much classic Opera-isms. I found the wonder that is the application manager that ties into various repositories. Installed lots of things to try out. Gaim actually works quite well! Well so does google talk. ;D I like it quite a bit. It integrates with the feel of the platform quite well! I've had a couple of odd crashes here and there, but it comes back pretty cheerfully from the crashes, so no big deal. I've been experimenting with the PIM software that's GPE based. Now, considering my feelings on GPE above, I wasn't expecting a lot, but for some reason, on the Nokia 770, it's all quite nice! Weird. I haven't investigated whether it can do syncml or anything along those lines. It has a note pad. It has a password manager that I was able to download. .. it's possible that this could be replacing my palm. I'm thinking about experimenting with it as a replacement next week to see how things flow. If nothing else, it makes an awesome ... well what it is. =) An Internet Tablet. I enabled swap on the RS MMC card that came with it and that works out well. Yeah you notice the slowness when it starts hitting swap but ... well what else is new. =)
Wildfire Gateway Plugin
A little while ago, Jive Software approached me about writing a java based plugin to Wildfire that would provide easy access to other IM protocols. At first I didn't think I had time for that, but as it turns out, for the most part, people have already written good libraries for the protocols under Java. Not quite so under Python. ;D Besides that, they offered to support the project a tad, and so I have been working on the plugin since. In this case, it is a single plugin that provides access to AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo. (IRC planned as well) It's sorta functional in it's current state. There's a couple of problems, and a couple of important lacks-of-functionality, but it's definitely coming right along. The guys from Jive have been very helpful and I'm quite excited about it. I'm hoping to have good solid base functionality soonish and a beta release. I have some awesome testers helping find bugs. There's a lot of things I'm able to do with the plugin that I'm "jealous" of with the python transports. For example, being able to interact with the user's roster directly is awesome. I don't have to store a copy of their buddy list, or worry about bombarding the user with a bunch of subscription requests, or worry about lack of support for group propagation, or lack of support for nickname propagation ... overall it's just really nice to work with internals for this. Does this mean I'm not touching my python transports anymore? Not at all. This plugin will only work with Wildfire and the python transports should work with everything. Likewise, with the plugin I'm aiming to keep "fairly minimal" whereas with PyAIMt and PyICQt have very intensive support. For example, with the plugin I'm not implementing 8 billion versions of how avatars are implemented. =) Anyway, stay tuned if you are interested. On a very very bright note, my reward for doing this should be arriving on Monday and it will singlehandedly increase the speed at which I can develop all of my projects. =) Score!
I'm using quite a few nifty toolkits with the plugin. JMML for MSN support. JYMSG for Yahoo support. JOSCAR for AIM/ICQ support. I am forgetting the name of the IRC toolkit I was looking at, but there is one out there. A lot of these are considered "not yet 1.0", but they appear to work fairly well. JMML is used with the planetamessenger.org stuff, which seem rather cool. JYMSG seems to be a tad stagnant, but works well. JOSCAR is actively being developed as part of Adium X and a 1.0 is right around the corner. There is a companion piece called oscar.jar, which I may switch to when it's released. Why? Well, it's much higher level than joscar, which matters less to me since I am quite familiar with the OSCAR protocol, but would benefit others who might be helping with the code. I'd like to try to keep this as non-complex as possible. IRC is going to be interesting. As we all know, IRC is primarily chatroom type stuff. I don't have any chatroom stuff written up for the plugin right now, but that's ok.
It's interested to see this implemented via java instead of python. One of the things about the python transports is that I am having to implement the oscar protocol as I go. With this, it's already there. One thing I'm pretty excited about is being able to use this to help with the python transports. I'll have two gateway-implemented interfaces with AIM/ICQ and I'll be able to watch the flow of things as they go through Wildfire and compare/contrast.
You know, I hadn't given Java much of a chance in the past. It's quite nifty. It seems a lot better than it was the last couple times I looked at it. Perhaps Sun has had quite a good effect on it? If so, go Sun. =) Having the guidance from the folk at Jive to get me started here and there has been wonderful as well.
Anyway, you can keep an eye on what I'm doing here if you are interested:
Gateway Plugin Repository
Blathersource
Man... yeah. I feel overwhelmed with the stupid crappy spammers, but I really need to fix things so I can stop them from bothering my site. Perhaps I will do that tonight 'real quick like'. I need to implement a couple of things to do it:
1. Add "either captchas or login" for posting anything.
2. Add ability to delete comments
3. Add ability to delete bug reports/feature requests
Hate.
All things that I need to run through and make sure I'm doing things correctly.